Friday, September 08, 2017

About two years ago, thousands of Java developers attended the JavaOne 2015 conference and learned about specifications and features that would be part of the Java EE 8 platform. These features included the MVC 1.0 specification, Java EE Security 1.0, Microservices, CDI and more. Java EE 8 was shaping up to be a great follow-up to the excellent Java EE 7 release.

After JavaOne 2015, progress and news around Java EE went silent. In early January 2016, I received an invite to a Slack group that was created by some members of the Java EE community. On the Slack channel, there were discussions around the halt of Java EE, and what the community may be able to do in order to keep it moving forward. I was humbled by the sense of community from the members of the channel and the devotion to the platform was very evident. Not long after, the Java EE Guardians were formed, focusing on publicizing the stall of Java EE. The group put forth effort pressuring Oracle to make a statement and continue moving Java EE forward. Especially in this fast paced space, looming silence regarding the future of any technology can be taxing on those involved. Others worked on the Java EE specifications as much as possible, making strides forward.

After almost a year of silence, we started to hear music around Java EE again, and at JavaOne 2016 Oracle unveiled the plan to continue moving Java EE 8 forward, albeit a bit differently than originally planned. The newly envisioned Java EE centered around Microservices and dropped a few of the specifications that no longer fit into the puzzle. MVC 1.0, JMS 2.1, and Management 2.0 were taken out of the picture, while the newly proposed Health Checking and Configuration APIs were added. MVC was eventually handed over to the community, which I think was a great move. The Health Checking and Configuration APIs, which were clearly aimed toward microservices support, were later taken out of the picture for Java EE 8 due to lack of time. Java EE 8 had more community involvement than any previous Java EE release, and much of this is likely due to the hiatus. Java EE 8 moves forward, albeit a bit more lean than originally planned, we are moving forward.

Now, nearing the JavaOne 2017 conference, we are on the heels of a Java EE 8 release. This release includes much of the original core Java EE 8 plan, bringing the Java EE platform in-line with Java SE 8. It also enhances CDI support throughout the specifications, brings forth Security 1.0, which is long overdue, and JSON-B, closing the JSON to Java conversion gap that was left after JSON-P was released. Java EE 8 will be a solid release, and I am thankful to all who are involved in making it happen. I am sorry to say that I will not be at the JavaOne conference this year when it will likely be released, but I know that my colleagues will keep me in-tune with the latest news coming from the conference! If you are going, make sure you check out the many great Java EE talks that will be presented.

Almost like a professional sports superstar going out on a high note, Oracle recently announced that they are planning to open source Java EE. I have to applaud Oracle for all of the great work they've done and the support that they've given to Java EE through the years. I am hopeful that they will remain engaged even after Java EE is open sourced, as they are a very important player in this space. In my mind, they chose a perfect time to announce the opening of Java EE, as the Java EE 8 release will mark a great milestone making Java EE even more productive and relevant as one of the top application development platforms in the industry. The community around Java EE seems as though it has never been more engaged than it is now. Over the years since the cumbersome J2EE morphed into the productive platform that we call Java EE today, the community has continued to grow by the thousands. The Java EE Guardians have thousands of supporters, each of them hoping to help move Java EE forward for years to come.

I see a great future for an open Java EE. However, many questions are left to be answered. Will the JCP still be used to manage the changes that are proposed for the platform? Perhaps this is one of the questions that has the potential to impact the platform the most. If the JCP will still be used to manage the platform, can it be changed in such a way that it will be conducive to a faster moving platform? Do we want Java EE to become a faster moving platform, much to the likes of other frameworks such as Spring?

One of the main strongholds of Java EE is standardization. If the open Java EE were to become more dynamic, can it maintain its place as a standard in the industry? I think so. I think that ideally the JCP could still be used to move the specifications forward, with a bit of a modernizing on the approach. I like the idea of having shorter Java EE release cycles with fewer changes in each release. Such an approach can really help the platform to retain its relevancy in this fast moving space.

What are your thoughts on the opening of Java EE? I welcome it and look forward to seeing what is to come for JavaOne 2018.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Java EE 8 will be finalized and ready for public use soon. There is no better time to get started testing the new features than now. You can do so by grabbing a copy of my Java EE 8 Playground project and deploying to GlassFish 5.

I've just updated the project to repair bugs and include better formatted table data within the tables. I've also added a couple of examples:

Saturday, June 10, 2017

A bit ahead of schedule, my latest book entitled Java 9 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, has just been published!

This book is the 3rd Edition in the Java Recipes series. It covers all of the information that was in the previous editions, including the new content for Java 9. Specifically, you will learn how to use new Java 9 features including:

Modularity

Private Method Implementations in Interfaces

Process API Enhancements

New Streams API Enhancements

HTTP/2 Client API

I'd like to thank Apress for providing me with the opportunity to help share my knowledge of the Java platform.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

The Java EE 8 Platform has definitely been moving along within the past couple of months. Specifications have been releasing early draft reviews, milestones, and even final releases. As a matter of fact, JSR-372 has just gone final, as JSF 2.3 has been released. For more information, please see Arjan's Post. It had the privilege to be a part of the JSR-372 expert group, and I really appreciate the opportunity to work with these experts on a specification that I use every day.

I created a Github Project entitled the Java EE 8 Playground, and it includes a Java EE application that contains a number of the latest updates to those specifications that will be part of the Java EE 8 release. I will make an effort to update this project often so that it includes current dependencies for the specifications. I will also try to add demos for the specifications so that it will be easy to build upon the examples. In the current project, some of the JSF 2.3 features are used.

It is important that as a community we test and provide feedback for the Java EE 8 specifications as they are being developed. It is in these stages that you have a voice that can make a change to an upcoming specification. Please test, read the latest specification documents, and provide feedback to the respective JSRs.

Saturday, March 04, 2017

Contexts and Dependency Injection 2.0 (JSR 365), is an update to CDI 1.2, which is currently part of the Java EE 7 platform. It is currently in Public Review stage. For those of you who are not very familiar with CDI, it defines a powerful set of complimentary services that act as a gel that help to improve the coordination and structure of application code. For more details, please visit the specification page.

CDI 2.0 expands the usability of the Contexts and Dependency Injection services to Java SE as well, as it will now target both the Java SE and Java EE platforms. The CDI specification has been organized into 3 parts, Part I - Core CDI, Part II - CDI in Java SE, and Part III - CDI in Java EE. The major changes for CDI 2.0 are as follows:

Better alignment with Java SE 8

API for booting CDI within a Java SE application

Ability to provide observer ordering

Ability to fire asynchronous events

New Configurators Interfaces for Service Provider Interface (SPI) elements

Ability to configure or veto an observer method in ProcessObserverEvent event

Support for inline instantiation of specific annotation types

Addition of the InterceptionFactory interface, which allows to create a wrapper instance whose method invocations are intercepted by method interceptors and forwarded to a provided instance.

I encourage you to take a look at the CDI 2.0 Public Review Draft for more details on the specifics of each enhancement listed, as well as a complete listing of new features. Read through the draft and provide feedback to the expert group. All of the pertinent details for providing feedback can be found on the JSR 365 page. To get started testing, create a new maven based Java EE application in your favorite IDE, and add the following dependencies:

In this post, we will dig into one of the new features to get you started working with the API. Let's take a look at asynchronous events. Until CDI 2.0, events could only be fired in a synchronous manner. They've been enhanced in this latest iteration for asynchronous processing. Here's how it works:

Create an event of some type. Next, fire the event in an asynchronous manner, and handle accordingly once the event is complete. In this example, I have created a MovieEvent class, which will be utilized whenever a persist event occurs for a Movie object. The MovieEvent class is as follows:

When the event is fired, it creates a new MovieEvent object, and if it successfully completes then a message is printed to indicate success. In this example, a stream is used to process the "whenComplete" action.

Feel free to clone the repository located at https://github.com/juneau001/CdiTest and take CDI 2.0 test for a spin. This example is just one simple test of CDI 2.0. You can clone and utilize this test project as a starting point to work with other aspects of the specification. Keep an eye on JSR 365, which is currently in the Public Review Ballot stages.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

I had the pleasure of attending JavaOne this year, and I can sum up the experience in one word: Brilliant. This year was much different than in years past for me, as I had one talk to co-present on Sunday and I had the rest of the week wide open for attending sessions. As such, I've learned that it really is nice to have a lighter schedule at JavaOne so that you can take in all of the expertise and networking...that is what JavaOne is all about...learning from the experts and growing your network. I also had my lovely wife along with for part of this trip, which made my stay in San Francisco very nice, as I finally took a few minutes to enjoy the city this year...never had done that in the past.

My conference experience started off with the excellent NetBeans party on Saturday evening. I am a member of the NetBeans Dream Team, so many of my colleagues were in attendance at this party. It was the first time I had seen many old friends, and it was great to have a chance to catch up without needing to worry about rushing to the next session. I want to thank Geertjan Wielenga and Oracle for hosting this excellent event, and I cannot wait until the next Apache NetBeans party.

On Sunday at NetBeans Day, I had the pleasure of presenting "Enterprise Modeling of MVC and Java EE Artifacts" with experts Ivar Grimstad and Gaurav Gupta. Ivar is on the expert group for JSR 371 (MVC 1.0)...which we hope to move forward for use with Java EE 8. Gaurav is the lead developer for the excellent JPA Modeler tool. During our session, Ivar gave an overview of MVC 1.0, Gaurav highlighted the JPA Modeler utility, and I demonstrated how the JPA Modeler could be utilized with JSF applications, as well as MVC 1.0. I want to thank Geertjan again for getting the three of us together for this excellent talk.

The opening keynote was amazing. A large portion was devoted to showing how the world is using Java, including the outstanding Mars rover presentation by Dr. Anita Sengupta (@Doctor_Astro). It was amazing to see the complexity and detail that went into ensuring the Curiosity rover landed without issues. Of course, Java 9 was mentioned, along with a demo of modularity and the jshell by Mark Reinhold...very informative, as always.

During the opening keynote, I anxiously awaited word on the status of Java EE, and after quite a long wait, the announcement was made. I am very excited that Java EE 8 efforts are moving forward, albeit a bit differently than previously planned. Essentially most of the specifications for Java EE 8 is moving forward, and it is proposed that the following be removed so that resources can spend time in other areas: JSR 371 (MVC 1.0) and JSR 368 (JMS 2.1), JSR 373 (Management 2.0).I will cover my thoughts on these proposed dropped specifications in a follow-up post. The main focus for Java EE 8 will be to start paving the path for a more micoservices focused platform, whereby Java EE 9 will be released a year later and it will include the full microservices implementation. The addition of Health Checking and Configuration specifications would be beneficial for providing a standard means by which to monitor services and dynamically configure our applications. Overall, it is great to see things moving forward for Java EE, although I do have some reservations on the overall approach. I do not believe that every industry will adopt the microservices architecture, so there needs to be a path for those who will be continuing with the standard Java EE application architecture.

Rather than going through detail on each of the sessions that I had attended, I will provide a summary of my thoughts on the conference overall. As I have said many times before, time is not our friend...and this certainly was the case this year at JavaOne, as there were too many great tutorials, sessions, and networking events that it was difficult to see everything. Hats off to Sharat Chander and others at Oracle for organizing such a great conference. I also want to thank the content review committees for reviewing and choosing such great conference tutorials and sessions...the content was excellent!

The tutorials and hands-on labs dealing with Microservices were hot this year. I attended two of them myself. One of them was a hands on lab that enabled us to develop Microservices using JBoss Forge and WildFly Swarm. It was a fast pace tutorial covering everything from setting up Eclipse (unfortunately not my favorite IDE), through utilizing Forge, constructing services, and deployment. I am glad I attended, as it gave me a different perspective on development from what I am used to. The second was a tutorial on utilizing Payara Micro and the Payara MicroProfile. I found this tutorial very in-depth, covering these technologies from the ground-up, with lots of detailed explanation. I learned it is quite easy to add the Payara Microprofile to a project, simply by including the dependency in the POM:

I attended many key Java EE sessions, including those given by Linda DeMichiel and others leading the specifications. All of these were informative, covering content from previous Java EE incarnations through what to expect in Java EE 8. Linda's presentation on Monday went into a bit more detail on the plans for Java EE 8, and it is clear to see that Oracle is "all in" on moving forward with the newly proposed plan for Java EE 8...which is great! Each of the specification-specific talks that I attended were excellent, including CDI 2.0, JAX-RS 2.1, and JSF 2.3. Great to hear from the experts for these areas. I also took in a couple of other key talks: Java EE Extendable to Functional by David Blevins, and 50 Java EE Best Practices by Ryan Cuprak and Michael Remijan...both great!

There were a lot of sessions on Java 9 and modularity this year. I attended a session on modularity, which was a great introduction for those hadn't yet had a chance to experiment with it. Docker was another hot topic at the conference, and I had the opportunity to attend a couple of sessions covering this great tech.

I had the privilege to attend the JCP Party on Monday evening. Always an excellent opportunity to network with others in the JCP, and this year's event did not let us down. The Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), Bob Paulin, and myself won an award at the JCP Party on Monday evening for Adopt-a-JSR participants of the year. This was a very nice surprise! I also attended PartyOne, hosted by Tomitribe, ZeroTurnaround, BainCapital, and Hazelcast. This was a great opportunity to network with so many experts...and there was also a great view of the Bay Bridge off the balcony. I want to thank Tomitribe for the invitation! Lastly, I attended the Oracle Appreciation Event, which was very nice. The Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne attendees had AT&T Park to themselves, and we got to see Sting and Gwen Stefani. Great networking opportunity with many great friends.

Overall, JavaOne 2016 was another great conference...very glad to have been a part of it. If you have not done so already, please take the Java EE Survey and provide your thoughts on the upcoming Java EE 8 proposal:http://glassfish.org/survey

Thursday, September 15, 2016

A while back, Geertjan Wielenga had posted about a NetBeans plugin that had been developed for the upcoming Java EE 8 MVC framework. The plugin was originally developed by Manfred Riem, co-spec lead for JSR 371, and Geertjan had extended it to add functionality for viewing all of the MVC controllers within an application. This plugin is a great start to a useful MVC plugin for NetBeans.

I've since taken the plugin and extended it further, adding the following enhancements:

NetBeans workspace now scanned to apply plugin only to those projects that contain MVC controller classes.

Ability to create a new MVC application which includes a basic controller class and corresponding view.

Ability to add new MVC controller class to a project.

Come and check out the new plugin functionality at JavaOne. I have the honor of presenting along with Ivar Grimstad (JSR 371 Expert Group) and Gaurav Gupta (JPA Modeler) in the presentation UGF6435 -- Enterprise Modeling of MVC and Java EE Artifacts for NetBeans Day 2016. I'll demo the plugin during the session, alongside the powerful JPA Modeler utility. Hope to see you there!